The writer of Veep and The Thick of It tells us the secret to making politics funny

In a less excitable age, Clement Attlee was once obligingly asked by a BBC journalist “Prime minister, do you have anything to say to the nation?” to which Attlee said "no" and walked off. The days of such deference towards our public officials are long-since behind us. Since Yes Minister started on British screens in 1980, there has been a steady flow of barbed satire aimed squarely at our public life. Margaret Thatcher was portrayed as a bulge-eyed puppet overseeing a cabinet of vegetables in Spitting Image. The politics of the New Labour years was eviscerated in the political procedural satire The Thick of It, and the BBC now routinely mocks public life and itself with comedy sitcoms like Twenty Twelve and the successor W1A. From Tracy Ullman’s Angela Merkel sketches, to Harry & Paul’s skewering of Question Time, British satire is world-class, but it’s a tough world to get into.

Ahead of this correspondent’s first ever political satire receiving its world premiere, GQ sought insight from one of the UK’s leading comedy exports. Simon Blackwell has been involved in some of the biggest UK comedy projects and has made a successful transition to the US comedy scene. He was part of the writing talent behind The Thick Of It, In The Loop, and winner of two Primetime Emmy Awards for HBO comedy Veep.

GQ: Who are the most deliberately and accidentally funny politicians on your radar?

Simon Blackwell: Jess Phillips, MP for Birmingham Yardley, is properly funny, instinctively knows how to get a laugh. She's head and shoulders above anyone else in the Commons. Alan Johnson has a nice wry line in self-deprecation. Jacob Rees-Mogg's remark to David Dimbleby on Question Time about going to Eton was a very well-timed gag, but I wouldn't book him for a stag do.

You started off walking into non-commissioned writers meetings in Broadcasting house: is it harder to get a break now in comedy, or easier thanks to the internet?

Easier for writer-performers I'd say, harder for writers who don't perform. A writer-performer can produce something that looks professional for not a lot of money, put it on YouTube and if the wind is in the right direction they can be a few retweets away from someone in TV seeing it and maybe taking it further. Obviously you still need talent and luck and perseverance and all that stuff, but YouTube is a shop window that didn't exist when I started out 19 years ago.

What did exist then for people like me who just wanted to write were two machines for producing writers - Week Ending and The News Huddlines. One or other, or both, was on BBC radio every week of the year, broadcasting to millions. You learnt how to write comedy while being paid to write it, you met other writers, you met producers who then moved into TV and if you were lucky took you with them. It produced scores of writers over the years who went on to write for panel shows and sitcoms and films, here and in the US. The BBC still has open-door radio shows, but they're tucked away a bit now, and on air less often. They don't bring through the same volume of new writers. So I think I'd have a harder time getting started if I were doing it now.

Some of your biggest shows have been political: happy coincidence, or lifelong passion?

More the former. As a narrative writer, what's interesting to me about politics is seeing people under constant pressure and 24/7 media scrutiny - how that affects you, the mistakes you make, the messy compromises you're forced into. I'm not a satirist, or at least I don't regard myself as one. It's too grand a title I think, and implies that you have some kind of remedy or manifesto to reform the things you're mocking. I'm not that clever. I'm a comedy writer who often writes comedy about politics, because it's human beings at a rolling boil.

Nathaniel Tapley

So the heady days of new writers strolling into the BBC and walking away with a show may be behind, but there is still comedy gold in the hills of British political life. Having announced Corbyn the Musical the backlash from his supporters was almost instantaneous. There is certainly a feeling among many that comedy comes from a naturally left-wing worldview. Yet to win any Primetime Emmys, but surely on his way there, is political comedy writer Nathaniel Tapley, who has considered the question of whether comedy has a natural home on the left.

GQ: Do you think it's harder to write comedy from a non-left perspective? Is there something inherent in the concept of "punching up" that pushes comedy to the left?

Nathaniel Tapley: I don't think it's harder to write comedy from a non-left perspective. It's just as easy to make fun of outsiders, the weak and the less fortunate, as anyone who went to school with a second-hand uniform or terrible glasses or an outsized face will probably remember.

Comedy has a long history of 'punching down': of the targets being foreigners, or the Irish, or mothers-in-law. There's a reasonably good argument to be made that one of the functions of comedy is to reinforce the status quo, that by laughing at a joke we're reaffirming our membership of the tribe of mammals that understand that joke. Mockery is there to point out the other, what's different, what's not-us.

Left-wing comedy, too, is often just using coded references that reassure those who like it that they're well-meaning, pure-of-heart non-Tories. Which is more likely than the theory that people are tuning in for the jokes.

For me, satire has to take one of the underpinnings of a person or real-world concept and stretch it until almost breaks. One-liners about George Osborne drinking the blood of orphans are not satire. They are well-documented truths.

[The number of left-wing comics] is probably at least partially a function of having a right-wing government, so most comedy aimed at the government will - of necessity - come from a position further left than the government. However, there's also probably a fair amount of selection bias, the fact that there's clearly a market for left-wing political comedy in a different way to the one for right-wing political comedy, something to do with the predominance of alumni of certain universities (where the comedy and theatrey people tend to look down on the political hacks and the political hacks tend to be dominated by Tories) and maybe writing political comedy requires having been angered by something, and those who have been, since 1979, most angered by the political direction of the country have been lefties... Or maybe we're just better at it.

Corbyn The Musical - The Motorcycle Diaries, written by Rupert Myers and Bobby Friedman is on at Waterloo East Theatre between the 12th and 24th April 2016. Buy tickets for Corbyn The Musical now